I
n the immediate years after World
War Two, the civil airliner market was
dominated by the US, bene ting from a
huge domestic market and an industrial
infrastructure untouched by the ravages of
con ict.
Demonstrating remarkable resilience,
Europe fought back and pioneered the
introduction of early jetliners with its de
Havilland Comet (Britain, 1949), the Sud
Aviation Caravelle (France, 1955) and the
Tupolev Tu-104 (USSR, 1955).
But sadly, the glory was to be short-
lived and, with the appearance of the
Boeing 707 in 1958, the US decisively
won the rst round of the jet age. Some
early European jetliner projects did achieve
some reasonable sales successes,
especially short-haul twin-jets such as
the BAC One-Eleven and Caravelle, but
more representative was the experience of
Hawker Siddeley with the Trident and Vickers
with the VC10.WIDEBODY COLLABORATION
Throughout the 1960s, every manufacturer
in Europe was working on a concept for
a widebody people-mover. Sud Aviation’s
Galion was to be a 200-seat widebody,
while BAC talked of a similar-capacity BAC
2-11. Hawker Siddeley planned a twin-
engine stretch version of the Trident and also
carried out joint studies with French rms
Nord Aviation and Breguet Aviation. Yet it
became increasingly clear that the market
could not support this number of competitors
and that the only way forward was for the
European airliner industry to rationalise its
efforts and put them into one aircraft.
Consequently, a high-level meeting
between government ministers of France,
West Germany and Britain in July 1967
resulted in an agreement for greater
European co-operation in the eld of aviation
technology, making full use of the bene ts
of the European Economic Community, also
then known as the Common Market. Morespeci cally, the meeting called “for the joint
development and production of an airbus”,
to be a widebody twin airliner. This was the
rst time the word ‘airbus’ was used, though
at that point it was still a generic term. The
word took hold because it was linguistically
appropriate to all parties.
The new project was headed by General
Manager Henri Ziegler and Technical
Director Roger Béteille, both of Sud
Aviation. German politician Franz Josef
Strauss was appointed Chairman of what
would become Airbus Industrie. France
would build the cockpit, wing box and
control systems; West Germany would
produce the upper fuselage and Britain
would manufacture the wing.
The new ‘airframer’ was officially
incorporated on July 25, 1967 in an
agreement between the governments
of France, West Germany and the UK
involving state-owned aerospace companies.
With concerns about the viability of theAIRBUS A300
FIRST OF THE FAMILY
Today, Airbus rivals Boeing for the title of the world’s leading airliner manufacturer.
But it was a very different story some 50 years ago when Europe planned to
build the world’s fi rst widebodied twin-engined jet airliner. Charles Kennedy
examines the highs and lows of the game-changing Airbus A300.
66 Aviation News incorporating Jets March 201766-71_a300DC.mf.indd 66 03/02/2017 17:50